Best known for his 'Entry of the Gladiators' march, which has become irreversably associated with circuses in the English-speaking world, Austro-Hungarian army musician Fucik was also a master waltz-smith, a Bohemian Sousa and Strauss combined. His waltzes drip with Slavonic melancholy. Long, tragic introductions launch the listener into powerful rhythms that are at once masculine and military, sugar-sweet and highly sentimental. Nothing compares.The Czech Philarmonic are here playing the work of one of their own, and it shows. The bandmaster who was once banned from his native Prague, for being too popular, is alive and well and home at last.